Online Marketeer

Hi everyone!

My name is Julia and I am an alumnus of the University of Groningen. I graduated from European Languages and Cultures in the summer of 2021 with Russian, linguistics and translation sciences within my study program. In my third year I did a board year for Esperia and in the fourth year I chose the Faculty Minor English Studies (basically I was broke and I couldn’t study in Russia). Before I studied ELC, I graduated from the Hanzehogeschool in 2018 with a major in Game Design within the Communication and Multimedia Design programme. And now I’m an online marketeer!

I’d like to say that my “career” started once I applied via Esperia for a job as a project manager at Global Textware, the translation agency probably all Esperians know. It’s probably in the job title, but a project manager takes care of all the files and communication between the involved parties during a project. My job, therefore, was to receive and start translation projects, choosing suitable translators for the job and creating a planning, uploading and downloading files and, once the text was translated, send it back to the customer. What might seem like a setback at first, not going abroad gave me the chance to improve my English writing skills and apply them within my job as Global Textware is an international translation agency. If I had some free time in between managing projects, I was also allowed to translate short marketing related texts, which was fun! As translators always translate to their mother tongue, perfect Dutch skills were also very important. Yeah well, believe me… Even though I’m a native Dutchie, mistakes were made, haha! Besides English and Dutch being important skills within the translation world, international and intercultural communication is also crucial. As many projects had strict deadlines, clear communication with your team is key. Luckily, after gaining some experience you will know how and when translators work; this allowed me to create a suitable plan for the project and avoid angry customers. After 1,5 years of working at Global Textware, I decided that it was time for a more creative chapter within my career.

One year ago I became an online marketeer at Floer, a local flooring company. I could finally use my creativity within my job! The tasks of an online marketeer vary, and I was among other things tasked with writing blogs, answering online comments and creating a content calendar. Later on in the year Floer decided to go international! Again, my English skills were useful since I was tasked with translating the website to English, which is quite a big job. Currently, I’m still working on the translation. As an online marketeer, search methods are actually useful! Why, do you ask? Well, in order to create a successful marketing strategy and content planning, you have to do a lot of research on what works and what doesn’t work. And the planning I came up with still works, score! One of the most important skills as an online marketeer at a flooring company is to know what looks good and what doesn’t. I often create graphics with Adobe InDesign, Illustrator or Photoshop which we use in our marketing strategy. When I studied Game Design, these programmes were a daily task which is super handy! My tip: regardless of whether you will work within marketing or not, I recommend you to learn the basics of Photoshop! Once you know the basics of this software, you’ll also get the other two. As Floer is a flooring company, we often have photoshoots for new products. For these photoshoots we need to create a beautiful small corner of furniture which has to attract the customer in buying the floor (this is marketing 101, folks). Knowing what looks good isn’t necessarily a skill that you can learn from a study, but you can develop it by practicing over and over and over again.

Currently I am working on more visual and graphic projects at Floer (see image to the left) and I’m very happy that I can use my skills from both studies within my job. When people ask, ‘why did you even study Russian if you don’t even do anything with it’, I simply answer them that you can become anything with ELC. Sure, I can barely tell my age or my address in Russian after 4 years, but I have gained a lot of other skills that I can use. Intercultural communication, project planning, visual design, concept development and creative and critical thinking are skills that you can use within your studies, but they’re especially important when starting your career! So put them to good use 🙂

xoxo Hool